I could decide that I’d never give him that choice, but I couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t. She tolerated me, even liked me maybe, but she was a teenager: capricious, impulsive, with the potential to be vindictive. I couldn’t risk it. I know most people would have rolled over and taken that risk, accepted that they’d always be second best. But I’m not like most people. I’m not afraid of the worst things, and I know that if you want something enough, then you need to make it happen.
ALEX
SEPTEMBER 2017
I don’t believe her at first. I listen to her, and I watch her—her long slim fingers curling over the sleeves of her pale pink sweater and worrying at the wool, the way she moves her head swiftly to the side every so often like a nervous tic. She’s persuasive, but my overriding feeling is that she’s probably mad. I nod and make the odd noise of encouragement as she speaks, but I’m thinking about how I can make my excuses and leave before this situation gets any weirder.
I can’t pinpoint the moment when the tide starts to turn. Maybe it’s the amount she seems to know about Natalie, things that it would be impossible for any observer from afar to know. She knows about the habit she has of staring into mirrors, losing herself in her reflection. She knows about the unpredictable, mercurial sweep of her moods, from effervescence to apathy within the space of a few hours. She knows the songs she sings in the shower.
“I know this is a shock,” she says at last, “but I have no reason to lie to you. Look. There’s something else I’ve got that might help.” She fishes in her pocket and pulls out an old, crumpled piece of paper that she smooths out and lays on the table between us. It’s a handwritten note, short and to the point. My eye goes straight to the signature: Sadie. It’s Natalie’s handwriting, I’m almost sure of it, but more than this, I’m drawn to the wording.
Didn’t want to wake you to say good-bye.
There’s an echo of familiarity to it that I can’t quite catch, and then I remember.
Slowly, I reach into my own pocket and take out the note that Natalie left me the other day in the hotel room. I didn’t want to wake you—I remember feeling aggrieved, that there was something disingenuous and sly about it. I place it next to the note that the woman has shown me, and I half laugh. It’s almost identical.
Cali—Rachel, I think, and it’s easy to fit the name to her face, in a way that it never has been with Natalie—is watching me, trying to read my expression. “It was the only thing I kept that she’d given me, and even that was by mistake—I found it at the bottom of my bag after I’d gone,” she says. “Keeping too much from your previous life is discouraged. And anyway, I didn’t want to.”
I look up at her. Her gaze is steady and open, and in this moment the conviction that I can trust her grows and strengthens. “I just don’t understand,” I say levelly. “Why wouldn’t she have told me the truth?”
Rachel shrugs, looking briefly contemptuous. “It’s not exactly something that comes naturally to her, or it never used to be. If I had to guess, I’d say that she doesn’t want to come across as the bad guy. She is someone totally different from the person you thought she was, Alex. I used to try to think of her as a loose cannon, a free spirit. A bit wild and easily led astray, but essentially a good person, you know? But it just isn’t true. She was wired differently from most people. It made her special, and it made her . . .” She hesitates, as if catching herself in the act of melodrama, then gives a little decisive nod. “Dangerous,” she says, with some defiance.
“People can change.” It’s all I can think of to say.
She nods, frowning a little. “They can, of course. Once I found out that she had been released, I tried to convince myself that she’d be different now. But I didn’t really believe it. Spending that long in prison, it wouldn’t mellow you, would it? It would harden you even more. Obviously I couldn’t be in touch with her, and I didn’t want to be, but I hired a private detective to keep tabs on her when she was first out and living in London—I know,” she interrupts herself, “it sounds mad, but I needed to know what was going on with her. I suppose despite everything I couldn’t quite let go.”
“And?” I ask.
“And nothing, really. She was working, had friends, boyfriends, but nothing serious. I was told she was using a new name, Natalie Stephens, and after a while she made it official and changed it legally. And then she met you, and moved to Brighton, and I thought maybe she’d settled down at last. I stopped keeping tabs on her for a while, but I was still worried. More worried, if anything.” She glances up and catches the question in my expression. “I suppose I just couldn’t see her being in a healthy relationship, to be honest. It was at odds with everything I knew about her. I was worried, mainly, for you.”
My first instinct is to dismiss this. I don’t need your concern, thanks very much. But there’s something simple and unadulterated about what she’s said, and it isn’t said with pity, exactly. More as if she’s just letting me know that she’s in my corner.
“I was particularly unsure,” she continues, “when I found out that you had a daughter. Sadie really isn’t the maternal type, and I couldn’t see her in a stepmother role.” I’m about to interrupt and protest, because this is something I do know more about than she does—we’ve had our issues but she’s good with Jade, has instinctively found the right balance between friendship and authority—but she hurries on. “She lost a baby, you know, back when she was nineteen and she was seeing Kas. It must have happened around the same time as the trial. I don’t think it’s something she would have got over easily.”
She pauses, but my throat feels sewn up. I’m thinking about Kaspar—the realization belatedly hitting that it’s my own wife who was involved with him, my own wife who slept with him, and the sudden understanding of that little half smile he gave as I left, as if life could still surprise him. And now the knowledge that there could have been a child, that his baby was growing inside the woman who told me from the start that she never wanted to have her own children. I expect you’re relieved, aren’t you, Alex? You wouldn’t have wanted to go back to the start, all the nappies and the sleepless nights?
“She said she didn’t want kids,” I say.
Rachel looks unsurprised. “It’s a strange choice then, to be in a relationship with a man who already had one. It’s not like she couldn’t have found someone with less baggage . . . No offense.”
“She fell in love with me,” I say a little sharply.
“I’m sure she did.”
There is silence for a few moments, something uneasy stirring in the air between us. Rachel is frowning down at her hands, as if she’s trying to fit the pieces of what we’re saying together. And in that silence, a strange feeling starts creeping over me. I have an increasingly strong desire—a need—to be with Jade. It’s probably just the way that Rachel has brought her into the conversation. She doesn’t fit there. I already know that I’m going to have to confront Natalie about all of this, but I don’t want Jade to be caught in the crossfire. It’s my job to protect her, and right now she feels very far away.
The thought triggers another. “Have you had Jade followed?” I ask Rachel. I’m aware that I sound aggressive, and I make an effort to soften my voice. “If you have then I’m sure you had your reasons, but I need to know.”
She shakes her head, eyes wide and questioning. “No, never. The only contact I’ve had, personally or remotely, has been with you.” She sucks in her cheek in a brief moment of awkwardness, those late-night conversations shimmering in the air between us. “And I only did that because like I said before, I felt like I had to know if you were happy. At least, at first.” She hesitates, then seems to cut her own line of conversation off, sitting back in her chair and smoothing her hair nervously back behind her ears. “But why do you ask?” she says.
“There’s been a man,” I say slowly, “hanging around my daughter. I think his name is Dom
inic Westwood.”
Rachel looks worried. “I don’t know anything about that. But I knew Dominic. He was close to Kas. Sadie would consider him a friend of hers. I can tell you that.”
The unease is growing, building painfully in my chest. I try to ground myself, remember all the moments of intimacy and tenderness Natalie and I have shared, but they don’t reassure me. All I can think is that my wife is a great actress. She’s someone who can hide an entire life’s worth of history and then lie to me all over again even as she reveals it. I have no way of knowing if anything we’ve shared is real, if she’s ever even loved me at all.
Abruptly, I stand up. “I need to make a phone call,” I say. “Just give me a minute.”
“Sure.” Rachel looks as if she wants to ask what I’m doing, but she casts her eyes down and breathes in deeply, restraining herself. As I walk away across the bar, I glance over my shoulder. From the back, she could be Natalie. The same delicate yet pronounced shoulder blades, the same elegantly curved neck.
Outside it’s getting dark, the sun sinking into the dark blurred line where sea meets sky. I call Jade’s number, but it rings a few times and then goes straight to voice mail. It’s not surprising—making calls on the ward is frowned upon, so her phone is often on silent—but my hands are shaking as I dial the number for the hospital. It takes a long time for anyone to answer. I’m staring at the setting sun as I wait, and when I glance away a little colored shadow is burned on to my retina, glimmering faintly, suspended in the air.
At last someone on the switchboard picks up and I ask to be transferred to the burn unit, then tell the receptionist that I want to speak to Jade. She tells me to bear with her, and then puts me on hold. I listen to the scratchy looped music, rattling down the line like coins in a can.
All at once the music cuts out and the line is back. For a few seconds there’s no sound except for the muffled backdrop of the ward; footsteps coming and going, murmured conversations. “Hello?” I ask, my heart lifting. “Jade, is that you?”
“Sorry.” The receptionist’s voice comes through loud and clear again. “I was just asking one of the nurses if she knew where Jade was.”
“Where she is?” I ask sharply. “Well, she’ll be in her bed, won’t she? Or possibly in the toilet, or the communal area. There are only so many places.”
“The bed that was hers has been filled by another patient,” the receptionist says, clearly parroting what she’s been told. Her voice is polite, but a little bored. She must have this kind of conversation all the time. A hospital is a vast and complex engine room, full of misunderstandings and miscommunications—and yet a sharp flare of panic shoots through me.
“Well, I suppose she’s been moved for some reason,” I say, hearing my voice sound bizarrely authoritative and calm. “Can you please find out where to? Or can you get a doctor on the line?”
“I’ll see what I can do.” The hold music clicks back on. Its beat thumps in rhythm with my heart, and my breath is short, as if I’ve been running.
SADIE
SEPTEMBER 2017
The taxi lingers in traffic for a while and I take the opportunity to call Dominic again, but just like the last four times I’ve tried, he doesn’t pick up. I decide to text him instead. I send a curt message, telling him where I’ll be later and when. Whatever he thinks of my plan, I know he won’t call the police—he doesn’t trust them an inch, and they’ve got too much on him. And I haven’t entirely lost hope that he’ll come round. I’d still rather have his help.
I’d have expected more of him, considering all his talk about loyalty, and considering what he owes me. Back at the time of the trial, Kas and I closed ranks. We didn’t bring him into the frame, and Rachel never knew that he was involved, so her little snitching performance didn’t impact him. I think the police had their suspicions; he was questioned more than once, but they couldn’t find enough to charge him. There would have been no point in us bringing him down with us—it’s not like it would have diluted anything. In situations like that, blame seems to multiply like magic. It seems there’s always plenty of it to go round.
So when I first tracked him down and got in touch, I had the right to ask him for something and he knew it. We met in an anonymous downbeat bar just outside Brighton and I told him about Jade. I gave him the facts and he told me he understood. I didn’t have to think too much about it. I didn’t want to get too involved myself in her . . . disappearance. It was too much of a risk, and besides, something in me pushed back against it when I thought about it. It wasn’t the same as with Melanie. This was preplanned, and there was another reluctance there, something I couldn’t quite pin down. A bit of human compassion, maybe. Or just squeamishness. I don’t know.
What I hadn’t realized was how lightweight Dominic had become. The years had sanded off his hard edges, and while Kas and I had been inside, building up shells as hard as bulletproof glass, he’d been hanging out with a crowd that had clearly lost its focus once their leader had gone. When I asked what he’d been doing, he just shrugged and muttered. Reading between the lines, he seemed to have scaled down to the odd small-time drug deal. At one point he even mentioned working in a minimart. I raised an eyebrow, and he backtracked a little, mumbling about it being good to have a front to deflect suspicion, but I wasn’t convinced. He’d put on a bit of weight, too; his fingers were soft and doughy, not the ones I remembered gripping me like iron on that day down in the basement at Kaspar’s, making damn sure that I didn’t escape.
Still, he was better than no one. We agreed that Dominic would scope Jade out for a bit, get the lay of the land and come up with a plan. So that’s what he did, only it went on for a lot longer than I’d anticipated. He hung around—not very fucking subtly, as I realized when Alex broke the news that she’d been noticing him for weeks—staring at her from across the street and psyching himself up, but that was about it. He pointed out that if he was seen talking to a fourteen-year-old girl then he’d get noticed pretty quickly, and that he wasn’t sure she was likely to be seduced by him. That I definitely agreed with. And Jade never went out alone after dark, so it was difficult.
That’s when I came up with the plan. I had no idea what kind of boys she was into, but I knew she spent a load of time on social media, so I created a few profiles and messaged her saying how cute she was, just throwing out bait. I made a female profile, too, just in case, but she blocked that one off straightaway, so I had my answer there. There was one profile she seemed more attracted to than the others. I’d taken a picture of a good-looking olive-skinned teenager off the net—he looked a bit like I would have imagined Kas to look at that age. She’d reply to his messages with the odd emoji, a blushing face or a little heart. At first I thought it might be enough to reel her in . . . that we could chat for a few weeks and then arrange to meet. But she was savvier than that. As soon as I even dropped a hint, she backed off. But now I knew what her type was, and I knew that Dominic would know someone who fit the bill.
Sure enough, when I asked he sent me the photo of a friend’s son, Jaxon: dark hair and eyes, a dusting of stubble at his jawline, a bit cocky looking. I got in touch and asked if he was interested in making a bit of extra cash. A one-off, and not much required from him. All he had to do was turn up at our house, dressed as you might expect a plumber to dress, chat Jade up a little, and give her his number. Only of course it wasn’t his number at all, just a spare pay-as-you-go phone that I’d bought in readiness. And I have to say, he played his part to perfection. I was there watching when Jade got home from school, and I saw the immediate light of interest in his eyes, and the way he straightened up slowly and gave her a look that was part seduction, part innocent awe. I left the room at a suitable point and waited for the magic to happen, and after he’d gone I could see the excitement Jade was trying so hard to suppress, the way she was clutching her phone.
After that we messaged for a few weeks, taking i
t slowly, getting to know each other, building up to a face-to-face meeting. The plan was that we’d arrange a rendezvous, somewhere private and not too far out of town so that she could get there easily. “Jaxon” would keep her waiting for a bit, send a few holding messages, until it got dark. Then, well, Dominic would show up instead. There’d be a message trail on her phone to tell the whole sorry story, and I’d have given Dominic the Jaxon phone to dispose of straightaway. I’d thought of everything.
I arranged to meet up with Dominic the night before, to go over the finer points. Originally we were going to meet in a bar, but at the last minute Alex reminded me he was going out that night, entertaining a client, and that I’d have to stay in with Jade. I messaged Dominic and he suggested we could reschedule, put the whole thing off for another week or two. But I didn’t want to lose momentum, just wanted it over with. So I told him to come over, later on that evening, when Jade would be in bed. He turned up about ten o’clock, and as far as I knew she was in her bedroom, lights out.
“I’m not sure about this.” Those were his first words when he came through the door and sat down heavily on the sofa. He couldn’t quite look me in the eye. “She’s just a kid, Sadie.” I could never get him to call me Natalie, no matter how many times I tried.
I knew as soon as he said that that it wasn’t going to work. Like I said, he’d gone soft. But I couldn’t face it, the thought of all this buildup being for nothing, and so I tried to change his mind. I argued that a life was a life, that it didn’t matter who it belonged to and that it didn’t really make sense to have scruples about some people and not others. Unless you knew and loved them, of course, but he didn’t know Jade at all. She was nothing to him. I reasoned that it would all be over so quickly, that it wasn’t the hardest thing he’d done. And when none of that worked, I tried to lay down the law and remind him of what I’d done for him, remind him that he owed me.
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